Money counts, but does not solve everything, recalls Isabelle Maréchal in The great resignation. After looking at the financial difficulties of the middle class, she dissects the relationship with work, revealing fed up and solutions found by citizens in search of a better life.
“It’s been a while since I moved away from objective journalism,” says Isabelle Maréchal. It’s not new that she wanted to express her ideas and her vision of the world, she explains: to a professor at UQAM who asked his students the kind of journalism they wanted to do, she already replied that she was aiming for the editorial! She therefore does not just observe society when she makes documentaries, she frankly criticizes and proposes solutions.
“We have to take a stand,” says the host and documentary maker. There is no one taking a stand, even politicians don’t do it. Who will do it? » It is not a question for her of being satisfied with the “debates” held on social networks where people share their opinions in echo chambers, thus preaching to people who already think like them.
The documentary constitutes a means of short-circuiting this system. “The documentary is a democratic tool to inform people. I almost said having a positive influence, she admits. In any case, it can show [aux gens] a vision of the world that they would not otherwise have access to in mainstream media and even less so on social networks. »
Bye Bye, boss
The great resignation is interested in the world of work. More precisely, what, in the world of work, exhausts and disgusts people to the point of encouraging them to radically change their lives. Isabelle Maréchal notably meets a former nurse and a former teacher who gave up everything, not because they did not believe in their profession, but because the chronic heaviness of their work led them to the end of their rope.
PHOTO ARCHIVES THE PRESS
Host and documentary maker Isabelle Maréchal
Teachers and nurses are precisely the ones who have just stood up to the government by demanding better salaries, of course, but also changes in their working conditions that allow them to devote themselves to their main task: caring for people and educating our people. children. “The government has not understood the basic message of the workers,” worries Isabelle Maréchal. She fears that a wave of resignations will hit these key sectors after the agreements reached last month.
Her recent documentary seeks to sound the alarm, she says, about these issues. People are less and less willing to work in conditions that threaten their mental health and that bosses sometimes earn several times their salary.
“I don’t accept that,” she says. And I’m not a Marxist. I am a capitalist social democrat. Money, for me, is not evil, on the contrary, it is a tool. As long as you don’t steal it from someone else’s wallet and you pay your fair share of taxes. »
What emerges from The great resignationis that workers are first and foremost citizens who seek balance.
“It’s not that young people no longer want to work,” says Émilie Ricard, the resigned nurse, “they want to live. » Fed up does not only concern millennials: Solène Dussault, whom the documentary maker also meets, left teaching at almost 50, after 25 years spent caring for primary school children.
Stronger and richer together
There are solutions to prevent the massive disengagement that Isabelle Maréchal fears, particularly because it would accentuate individualism and cause even greater structural challenges. In particular, she meets workers who have grouped together in a cooperative in the forestry sector, others who call themselves “chillionnaires” and who have pooled their strengths to invent a new, perfectly horizontal entrepreneurial structure focused on sharing. Profitable initiatives in both cases.
IMAGE FROM THE GREAT DEMISSION, PROVIDED BY IPROD MEDIA
Isabelle Maréchal (left) met Jasmine Desbiens, Walter-Olivier Rottman and Charlotte Vaydie-Bourgault, who settled in Gaspésie to create an alternative lifestyle.
These people who break away from established models are not cloud shovelers, but organized people who believe that work should help you live and not that you have to live to work. What catches the eye in The great resignation as in The means of the middle classprevious documentary by Isabelle Maréchal, is that they plead for major changes in our society.
“I am idealistic and I assume responsibility,” concedes Isabelle Maréchal. His vision of things is, however, anchored in observations. “We will have no choice but to face all these issues. We can bury our heads in the sand, but we are going to hit a wall, like with the climate issue, she judges. We can no longer consume as we do, we can no longer rely on industrial growth. […] We need to find a new model, closer to the community and collective projects. »
Wednesday, 8 p.m., on Télé-Québec, followed by a discussion moderated by Marie-Louise Arsenault